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But what if these searches still return too many irrelevant hits? Well then, you’ll just have to get more creative with your keywords.
• Add the class/department/subject area to the keyword string.
Ex: To locate articles about the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, you might search [Maasai + anthropology] to get only anthropological articles rather than biology, geography, tourism, or various other subjects interested in the Maasai and their homelands.
But don't limit yourself unnecessarily. In an anthropology paper, for example, there are various ways in which articles from Sociology, Women's Studies, Tourism Studies, Diaspora Studies, History, Linguistics, and any number of other subjects could be useful.
Special Cases for tricky subject searches: If you're writing a paper for an economics course and need most or all of your sources to be specifically from an economics viewpoint as opposed to those written by political science and history professors (which might also use the word “economic” to touch on those issues briefly), you might add the phrase [+ “department of economics”] be-cause when scholars and professors write an article in a peer-reviewed journal, they often list their university and department in the text of that paper (just be aware that different universities might call your department by slightly different names – try several in various searches). You can also try looking only for journals with “economics” in the journal title.
And just as you should consider different names for your subject area and university department, there are also alternative names for a lot of keywords that you can use whether you're using Google Scholar or your regular web search engine of choice so...
• Be creative and think outside the box.
The way you first think to describe something may not be the way that someone else first thinks to describe it. For example, a book that teaches kids how to get along might come up under [team-work] but not [cooperation] or vice versa. Try to put yourself in the mind of other people by guess-ing at other ways you could say the same things.
• Try being more or less specific.
Sometimes it's good to do several searches for various specific subtopics rather than to try and sort through a ton of results for a more general search.
Ex: if you're looking for mythology about fairies, searching for [faery], [faerie], [fay], and [fae] will get better results than just searching [fairies] and sifting through a lot of sites that aren't helpful (Disney fairies, for example).
Tip: You can search all of your alternative spellings at once using [OR] or [|] (the capital on the backslash key) between each keyword.
• Consider being extra specific when you're looking for a range of data.
Ex: Say you're looking for specifics on the bills debated in Congress in the years leading up to WWII. You can try searching [Congress bills statistics pre-WWII] but that's a pretty weak search. For one thing, it will probably return a lot of results for bills in congress during the war where the author happens to mention “pre-” anything. Also, WWII is written in a lot of different ways. And for another thing, information about that time period might not specifically refer to the war at all (especially period sources while won't have known the war was coming yet). You could try using the years though. You've probably got a fuzzy date range in mind but date ranges aren't good to search because if you try searching [1925-1940 bills Congress] you won't get an article that's on “Bills introduced in the US Congress between 1933 and 1939” even though that (hypothetical) article would be helpful. This is a case where being too specific will actually work to your benefit. If you searched [1938 Congress Bills], you would get it, as well as any other articles with a date range that included 1938.
• Don't be too specific when your research topic has a lot of different subtopics.
In those cases, sources have a choice of what to talk about on the subject. Each source is unlikely to cover all of them so being too specific will only get a fraction of the sources you could use.
Ex: if you're looking for what sort of things people believe ghosts can do, searching for [ghosts + EVPs] will only give you a fraction of the information out there because not every resource about the abilities of ghosts will necessarily mention EVPs. Searching [ghosts + EVPs + EMF + "shad-ow people"] would get even fewer hits because it would only return results that happened to mention all of those terms.
Important note: know your database. Some databases aren't set up for searching the whole text.
A library catalog, for example, won't return many (or any) results if you search [ghosts + EVPs] because books in a catalog are not tagged with every topic in their index. You'd need to search only for [ghosts] and then try any or all of the following:
• Use the advanced search tools and filters wisely.
In the ghosts example, you can usually limit your library catalog search results by selecting “non-fiction” from the search filters available. This will remove all fictional ghost stories from the list.
• Compare the call numbers for the results and browse the shelves at those numbers to see what else is available on that subject.
Ex: Books about ghosts appear at Dewey numbers 133 (paranormal), 398.2 (folktales), 973 (US history). Folktales and US history are both very large sections where books on ghosts may be hard to find among the others but there ought to be many books in the 133 section that could be useful, even if they didn't turn up with a search for [ghosts].
Another ex: Trying alternate headings like [teamwork] and [cooperation] is a good idea in a library catalog but trying [“getting along”] is not.
This is because library catalogs use common subject headings (it's a bit like a lowest common denominator for what each book is about). Keyword searches through card catalogs aren't quite the same thing as a keyword search through Google/Yahoo/Ixquick/etc – the card catalog search only checks what information the system has about the book (Title, Author, Subjects, etc) but it won't search the text of a book or the index so lots of words associated with your subject won't help you find books in a library catalog.
• Remember, you can always ask a librarian.
Librarians are familiar with the way their catalogs work so if you talk to them a bit about your topic, they'll be able to suggest good subject words, or show you where to find those subjects in the library.
But what if the library just doesn't have enough books on my subject?
Well, the obvious answer is to try searching the catalogs of any other libraries near you.
If that still doesn't work, instead of finding the library first and then looking for books, you can also try finding the books first and then looking for the libraries that have it.
• Try keyword searches on Google Books and then search for the titles you like on Worldcat.org.
Admittedly, this is time consuming and success depends greatly on the subject. If everyone and their uncle's written a book about it, or if practically no one has, this is not an efficient way to find books. However, if you have access to a lot of libraries (ex: if you go to a university in a major city), this is a great method.
To use Worldcat, just search the title of the book, find it in the list of results and click that link. Scroll down beneath the information about that book and you'll see a search bar with a zip code in it. Worldcat will probably guess your zip code based on your IP address but if it doesn't (or if it gets it wrong), type in your zip code and press enter. Watch as it pulls up a list of the closest libraries that have that title.
Are any of them close enough you could visit? Check their website to find out if they're open to the public and what their hours are. If they're not open to the public, see if you can phone or send an email asking if you can schedule a time to come in and look at the book, maybe photocopy a few pages for your research, that sort of thing.
Does your local library have an Interlibrary Loan program with any of them? (If you don't know, ask your librarian.) To place an Interlibrary Loan, you usually just have to talk to the person working the circulation desk at your local library and if they have a loan program, they can place that request for you, the library that owns the book will have it sent over and then your library will notify you when it arrives so you can pick it up.
(Back to Part 1) (Continue to Part 3)
• Add the class/department/subject area to the keyword string.
Ex: To locate articles about the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, you might search [Maasai + anthropology] to get only anthropological articles rather than biology, geography, tourism, or various other subjects interested in the Maasai and their homelands.
But don't limit yourself unnecessarily. In an anthropology paper, for example, there are various ways in which articles from Sociology, Women's Studies, Tourism Studies, Diaspora Studies, History, Linguistics, and any number of other subjects could be useful.
Special Cases for tricky subject searches: If you're writing a paper for an economics course and need most or all of your sources to be specifically from an economics viewpoint as opposed to those written by political science and history professors (which might also use the word “economic” to touch on those issues briefly), you might add the phrase [+ “department of economics”] be-cause when scholars and professors write an article in a peer-reviewed journal, they often list their university and department in the text of that paper (just be aware that different universities might call your department by slightly different names – try several in various searches). You can also try looking only for journals with “economics” in the journal title.
And just as you should consider different names for your subject area and university department, there are also alternative names for a lot of keywords that you can use whether you're using Google Scholar or your regular web search engine of choice so...
• Be creative and think outside the box.
The way you first think to describe something may not be the way that someone else first thinks to describe it. For example, a book that teaches kids how to get along might come up under [team-work] but not [cooperation] or vice versa. Try to put yourself in the mind of other people by guess-ing at other ways you could say the same things.
• Try being more or less specific.
Sometimes it's good to do several searches for various specific subtopics rather than to try and sort through a ton of results for a more general search.
Ex: if you're looking for mythology about fairies, searching for [faery], [faerie], [fay], and [fae] will get better results than just searching [fairies] and sifting through a lot of sites that aren't helpful (Disney fairies, for example).
Tip: You can search all of your alternative spellings at once using [OR] or [|] (the capital on the backslash key) between each keyword.
• Consider being extra specific when you're looking for a range of data.
Ex: Say you're looking for specifics on the bills debated in Congress in the years leading up to WWII. You can try searching [Congress bills statistics pre-WWII] but that's a pretty weak search. For one thing, it will probably return a lot of results for bills in congress during the war where the author happens to mention “pre-” anything. Also, WWII is written in a lot of different ways. And for another thing, information about that time period might not specifically refer to the war at all (especially period sources while won't have known the war was coming yet). You could try using the years though. You've probably got a fuzzy date range in mind but date ranges aren't good to search because if you try searching [1925-1940 bills Congress] you won't get an article that's on “Bills introduced in the US Congress between 1933 and 1939” even though that (hypothetical) article would be helpful. This is a case where being too specific will actually work to your benefit. If you searched [1938 Congress Bills], you would get it, as well as any other articles with a date range that included 1938.
• Don't be too specific when your research topic has a lot of different subtopics.
In those cases, sources have a choice of what to talk about on the subject. Each source is unlikely to cover all of them so being too specific will only get a fraction of the sources you could use.
Ex: if you're looking for what sort of things people believe ghosts can do, searching for [ghosts + EVPs] will only give you a fraction of the information out there because not every resource about the abilities of ghosts will necessarily mention EVPs. Searching [ghosts + EVPs + EMF + "shad-ow people"] would get even fewer hits because it would only return results that happened to mention all of those terms.
Important note: know your database. Some databases aren't set up for searching the whole text.
A library catalog, for example, won't return many (or any) results if you search [ghosts + EVPs] because books in a catalog are not tagged with every topic in their index. You'd need to search only for [ghosts] and then try any or all of the following:
• Use the advanced search tools and filters wisely.
In the ghosts example, you can usually limit your library catalog search results by selecting “non-fiction” from the search filters available. This will remove all fictional ghost stories from the list.
• Compare the call numbers for the results and browse the shelves at those numbers to see what else is available on that subject.
Ex: Books about ghosts appear at Dewey numbers 133 (paranormal), 398.2 (folktales), 973 (US history). Folktales and US history are both very large sections where books on ghosts may be hard to find among the others but there ought to be many books in the 133 section that could be useful, even if they didn't turn up with a search for [ghosts].
Another ex: Trying alternate headings like [teamwork] and [cooperation] is a good idea in a library catalog but trying [“getting along”] is not.
This is because library catalogs use common subject headings (it's a bit like a lowest common denominator for what each book is about). Keyword searches through card catalogs aren't quite the same thing as a keyword search through Google/Yahoo/Ixquick/etc – the card catalog search only checks what information the system has about the book (Title, Author, Subjects, etc) but it won't search the text of a book or the index so lots of words associated with your subject won't help you find books in a library catalog.
• Remember, you can always ask a librarian.
Librarians are familiar with the way their catalogs work so if you talk to them a bit about your topic, they'll be able to suggest good subject words, or show you where to find those subjects in the library.
But what if the library just doesn't have enough books on my subject?
Well, the obvious answer is to try searching the catalogs of any other libraries near you.
If that still doesn't work, instead of finding the library first and then looking for books, you can also try finding the books first and then looking for the libraries that have it.
• Try keyword searches on Google Books and then search for the titles you like on Worldcat.org.
Admittedly, this is time consuming and success depends greatly on the subject. If everyone and their uncle's written a book about it, or if practically no one has, this is not an efficient way to find books. However, if you have access to a lot of libraries (ex: if you go to a university in a major city), this is a great method.
To use Worldcat, just search the title of the book, find it in the list of results and click that link. Scroll down beneath the information about that book and you'll see a search bar with a zip code in it. Worldcat will probably guess your zip code based on your IP address but if it doesn't (or if it gets it wrong), type in your zip code and press enter. Watch as it pulls up a list of the closest libraries that have that title.
Are any of them close enough you could visit? Check their website to find out if they're open to the public and what their hours are. If they're not open to the public, see if you can phone or send an email asking if you can schedule a time to come in and look at the book, maybe photocopy a few pages for your research, that sort of thing.
Does your local library have an Interlibrary Loan program with any of them? (If you don't know, ask your librarian.) To place an Interlibrary Loan, you usually just have to talk to the person working the circulation desk at your local library and if they have a loan program, they can place that request for you, the library that owns the book will have it sent over and then your library will notify you when it arrives so you can pick it up.
(Back to Part 1) (Continue to Part 3)